Obama camp deserves ACA web criticism

There's no way to sugar-coat it: The Obama administration has thoroughly fouled up the enrollment for insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

People cannot get through to the federal website, healthcare.gov. When they do get through, they sometimes get repeatedly enrolled and unenrolled. The links between the federal government and insurance companies are, in the words of the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, "a disaster."

We can understand the problem of demand overwhelming the system, as Washington has had to operate the insurance exchanges for 34 of the 50 states, including North Carolina. We know that any new computer system, especially one as massive as this one, is going to have glitches.

But the problems here go far beyond glitches, something the administration finally admitted this week after pretending for two weeks that there was nothing significantly wrong. Both hardware and software are being changed, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The worst thing about this mess is that it plays into the hands of those who would delay the act with the ultimate goal of repealing it. But as Klein notes, the Republicans have been too busy trying to keep the government shut down to take advantage of the opportunity.

Speaking of the shutdown, Democrats erred in trying to add conditions to a bill to reopen the government. That was wrong when Republicans were doing it, and it's wrong now. Congress should pass clean bills to keep the government funded and forestall default, period.

The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. What law of that length is? It should be examined to see where it can be impproved. But, any changes should be debated fully and not under the pressure of an artificial crisis.

The act is the most important piece of social legislation since Medicare. It already is blocking insurers from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and allows parents to keep their children on their policies until age 26. Tens of millions of people will have access to affordable insurance for the first time.

The problems don't "matter so much in October, but for the actual enrollment campaign, this needs to get fixed by November or they won't be able to process the volume they're going to get," Jon Kingsdale, a consultant for several state-run exchanges, told The Wall Street Journal.

Those state exchanges, incidentally, aren't having the problems afflicting the federal system. "On balance, the state exchanges are doing better than the federal exchange. The federal exchange has, for all practical purposes, been impenetrable," health consultant Daniel Mendelson, who worked in the Clinton administration, told The New York Times.

"Individual state operations are more adaptable," Alan Weil, the executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, told The Times. "That does not mean that states get everything right. But they can respond more quickly to solve problems as they arise."

North Carolina could have had its own exchange. In fact, the Perdue administration was gearing up for that very goal. But, when Pat McCrory became governor, the effort was abandoned.

"A lot of liberals will be angry over this post," Klein wrote on his blog. "A lot of conservatives will be happy. ? But it's important to see the Affordable Care Act as something more than a pawn in the political wars: It's a real law that real people are desperately, nervously, urgently trying to access.

"And so far, the Obama administration has failed them."

It's hard to argue with that.

The task now is for the administration to get things right before the problems interfere seriously with implementation of the law.

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Obama camp deserves ACA web criticism

There's no way to sugar-coat it: The Obama administration has thoroughly fouled up the enrollment for insurance under the Affordable Care Act.